Resident Evil 2

Capcom brings fresh eyes to one of horror’s greatest locales.

The Resident Evil 2 of 2019 may have traded static camera angles for an over-the-shoulder view, but it still knows the value of a fixed perspective. As we wander the Raccoon City Police Station in the shoes of a decidedly grimmer Leon Kennedy, we discover a CCTV montage of an officer battling zombies elsewhere in the building, firing his pistol wildly as he backs from one screen to the next. Whether intentional or not, it’s a reminder of what the series has sacrificed in handing you control of the camera: the stress of recalculating line of sight to a threat when moving between viewpoints, the paranoia stoked by high-angle shots of cramped environments and of course, the ubiquity of blind spots, with players often forced to shoot at creatures that can only be heard.

“We can still create a feeling of unseen presence through level design,” creative director Kazunori Kadoi tells us – and, indeed, the remake’s binaural soundtrack bubbles with threat, from unearthly shrieks to an ominous dripping, but its handling of the space is very different. It’s a question of what your torchbeam misses as you probe newly dark and cluttered interiors, of deceptively still corpses masked by table legs and what might emerge from a crawlspace behind you. It’s also a question of how much you recall of the original’s maps: Capcom is keen for veterans to find the game much as they left it, but that degree of foreknowledge obviously creates opportunities for treachery. “We want to use your muscle memory to an extent – this is the lobby, these are the side corridors – while also making it fresh,” Kadoi says, with faintly sinister emphasis. Backtracking, in particular, is more perilous: as in more recent horror games, recovering a key puzzle item now often sees you running the gauntlet, as zombies jolt to life on the way back to the objective.